The Way Home Read online

  I revere trout – the creature itself, its spirit, its taste, and the vitality I feel when taking its flesh into my body on the rare occasion I get to eat it. There was a time when attempting to kill something that I claimed to love would have felt absurd, cognitively dissonant, grotesque, but now it seems quite natural. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But I’m not sure it’s possible to truly love anything you don’t depend upon. We only defend the things that we love, and you can’t pretend to truly love anything you wouldn’t willingly die defending. This perspective is similar to the widespread indigenous belief that in taking something’s life – a plant or an animal – you take on a responsibility for the wellbeing of its ‘tribe’, and that you commit yourself to the defence of its species and its ecosystem, to the death if necessary. It’s a perspective that recognises that the fate of each species, including our own, is linked to everything else.

  I pack my rod and flies, hop on the bike and take off fishing for the rest of the afternoon. First I need to get some new line from the local tackle shop.

  Looking back at my early twenties, I can see that I drew my sense of self-respect, to a large extent, from how much money I earned. We all did. As I stand in the fishing tackle shop waiting to buy a spool of 12-pound monofilament line – synthetic, disposable, cheap industrial stuff – I realise that I draw my sense of self-respect these days from how little money I need. This spring, once the nettles are out, I want to make my own fishing cord from its fibres, but until then I’m going to have to compromise.

  From the tackle shop I head south-west, towards the river. My body is craving protein. Three months ago I withdrew my usual sources of it – chickpeas, peanut butter, tahini, butter beans, the usual international, industrial vegan classics – to replace them with something I now couldn’t get a hook on. I haven’t fished for trout in earnest since I was a child, and it shows. After three hours I haven’t had had a single bite. Necessity, however, dictates that I persist. I don’t know whether it is still too cold for trout, if I’m using the wrong flies, whether I would be better off using spinners, if I am fishing at the wrong depth or if I’m doing any of the twenty other things that I probably shouldn’t be doing. I need to learn, and fast. I’ve enjoyed the afternoon’s fishing – casting may be a more appropriate word – and while it certainly feeds the soul, it is not feeding the body.

  One thing I have learned so far is that: it is futile learning how to fish without learning the river. Such things take time. I remind myself to have patience. It is on evenings like these that I wish I hadn’t spent four years sitting inside lecture halls learning financial economics, when I could have been outside learning real economics.

  ~

  I’ve just heard an interesting statistic: on average we touch our phones two and a half thousand times per day. Not having the internet, I’m unable to verify the source of that statistic, but my own observation of people in cities – sitting outside coffee shops, walking down the street, standing on the bus – gives me no reason to doubt it. A friend tells me that it is becoming common for people to use them in bed or while having a bath.

  I light a couple of candles next to our bed. Tonight is massage night, something we try to make time for twice a week. I start with Kirsty’s neck and slowly work my way down from the shoulders to her back, bum, hamstrings, calves and feet. The combination of being both a smallholder and a dancer means that Kirsty’s lower back always needs particular attention. Being influenced by tantra, our massages – when our minds aren’t wandering off somewhere else – are as much about conscious touch as they are about good, strong physical massage.

  By the time it is over she is half-asleep, so I blow the candles out and we turn in for the night.

  ~

  I was an average student. At primary school I showed some signs of promise, but after winning a scholarship to the local secondary school – which meant that I got all of my school books for free, a big thing back then – I lost interest quickly. Remarkably quickly.

  It was 1992 and the modernisation of Ireland had begun. I had no conception of political forces and their agendas at the time, but on reflection I can now see how the curriculum mirrored the ideologies that were shaping this new, strange Ireland. In English we studied the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, but not the spirited Kavanagh of ‘Pegasus’ which warns against selling your soul (which, throughout the poem, he describes as his horse), in a Faustian pact, to the devil:

  ‘Soul,’ I prayed,

  ‘I have hawked you through the world

  Of Church and State and meanest trade.

  But this evening, halter off,

  Never again will it go on.

  On the south side of ditches

  There is grazing of the sun.

  No more haggling with the world . . .’

  As I said these words he grew

  Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him

  Every land my imagination knew.

  Instead we read the miserable Kavanagh, odes to dejection like ‘Stony Grey Soil’ in which the farmer-poet, speaking to rural Ireland, said, ‘You burgled my bank of youth!’ For some reason that line is one of the few things from school that has stuck with me to this day.

  By the time I took my finals – the Leaving Certificate – at the age of seventeen, the only academic subjects I had any interest in were business and economics. It was in these that I got my top grades, despite – or perhaps, because of – being thrown out of both classes for challenging the teacher’s views. Like everyone else, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but like everyone else I was told I had to do something. I got offered a place on an undergraduate IT course in Belfast, which was where my five best friends had agreed to go, but at the last minute I decided to accept an offer to study business and economics in Galway instead. At that moment I didn’t know why I had made that choice, and I certainly couldn’t have foreseen the ways it would unfold in my life thereafter. I had just followed a hunch.

  ~

  It’s the second Tuesday of the month, and that means a trad session in Holohan’s. I’m here with Gillis, breaking up the cycle ride home from the lake. It’s supposed to start at 9:30 p.m., but there’s a healthy contempt for precision in places like this. The small hand of the clock on the wall is touching ten when one of the regulars walks in. He sits in the corner saying very little most nights, but tonight he has got the squeezebox under his arm, and as he walks in everyone in the pub looks towards him. In quick succession all eight musicians – guitarists, fiddlers, tin whistle and bodhrán players, and singers – are in, with their drink of choice in front of them without so much as a word. All of the musicians glance towards the squeezebox. He takes a sip from his whiskey, gives the nod, and off they go. For the next three hours eight musicians will weave their arts into one long, captivating, melodious whole, governed only by custom, tradition and the timeless uncertainty of emerging genius.

  Not long after they begin, two young girls and their mother – relatives of the landlord – walk in, full of smiles, arms loaded with tin-foiled plates. They shuffle quietly out the back, before re-emerging shortly afterwards with a platter of small, triangular sandwiches. To say that these sandwiches were free would be a denigration of the spirit of the act; the thought of charging for them doesn’t even enter their heads, it’s just what you do. Gillis and I are famished, and so our eyes light up at the sight of it. We have more than our fair share, but as Gillis has never been to a trad session before and is clearly enjoying it, we seem to be having more than our fair share of pints too. We only came in for one, or so we claim.

  After every few reels one of the musicians, or someone at the bar, pipes up with a song. At these points the whole of the pub goes quiet, and anyone daring to talk quickly gets shushed. The songs are sometimes lilting, other times reminiscent and sad, and are always followed by a hearty round of applause.

  Just as the musicians are finishing up we head for the door, and ready ourselves for the final leg of
the journey, all the way uphill to our beds.

  ~

  Lunchtime. Rain is in the air, I can feel it, and as I want to get the rest of the wood in under cover while it is still dry, I’m not keen to stop too long to eat.

  I grab a small willow basket and scurry off around the land looking for salad. It’s a good time of year for wild food. Dandelions (flowers and leaves) and ground elder – both of which are considered weeds and are distinctly flavoursome – are already out, and I mix them together with ramsons, wood sorrel and navelwort. We’re just coming out of ‘the hungry gap’ – that tough period in places like Britain and Ireland when the winter brassicas are finishing and the stores of roots are running out – and we’ve almost nothing in the garden, so this new growth of greens is welcome.

  A few leaves and flowers won’t keep me going until evening, however, so I take three hens’ eggs, crack them on the side of the mug, and swallow them raw, straight down the hatch. A bowl of oats and I’m off out the door again.

  It’s pissing it down as I haul the last log of the day through the copse and into the dry of the lean-to, each step squelched through the March mud. I was already tired and hungry and dirty, and now I’m soaked to the bone.

  Despite knowing little or nothing of the bloody, mucky realities of land-based lives, people sometimes tell me to be careful not to romanticise the past. On this, I agree. But I tell them to be even more careful of romanticising the future.

  ~

  In times like these, when scale and efficiency mean everything, a place can change overnight. I hadn’t been for a walk in almost a week, but I had heard a clatter of machines working in a nearby forest during that time, and I guess a part of me didn’t want to look for fear of what I might find.

  I decide to look. I turn the corner by the old gatehouse cottage, which is being renovated to rent out to tourists on Airbnb. My fears are confirmed. The forest, in which I’ve walked dogs most days since moving here, is gone. Just like that.

  Coillte – the semi-state body responsible for managing many of the country’s forests – are now clear-felling areas that had become part of my life. It’s not that you don’t know that it’s going to happen. You do. It’s a tree farm, after all – well, to them at least – not a self-willed woodland, and despite its name (coillte means ‘woods’ in Irish), they are in the business of producing timber, not protecting woodlands. All things considered, there was no reason for me to be shocked when I saw it. But I was. To the wildlife – fallow deer, woodlice, pine martens, pygmy shrews, red squirrels, midges – it must feel like the equivalent of the A-bomb on Hiroshima.

  It’s the speed that is the most startling. One minute it is there, the next minute it is gone. The machines which do the dirty work look like something out of the film Avatar. They do everything: fell the tree, lop its side branches, lift it, move it, stack it, all within the blink of an eye. Human feet don’t even need to touch the forest floor. These machines have none of the stiff rigidity of diggers, but all the dexterity of the human arm and hand. I watch one grab what looks to be a twenty-five-year-old spruce; it tosses it up like a toothpick, catches it, lifts it onto a trailer, all in one fell swoop. Then onto the next one without having to catch breath. Deadly efficient. There is already a bank of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of spruce trees neatly piled alongside the track where I walk Bulmers. The machines are using the collateral damage – the native trees, along with the invasive rhododendron and laurel that thrive in such acidic environments – as structure for their caterpillar tracks to move efficiently over.

  After staring at them making cricket stumps out of 10-metre trees for a short while, I walk on. Bulmers seems more interested in a smell he has stumbled upon in the long grass. I know that in a short time I’ll get used to this war zone, and I think that’s what bothers me most. I know that all of the mammals will have got out in good time and that, for now at least, they should find other places to go. Their habitat is becoming more scarce, however, and the herd will always be made to fit the range. For those other non-human tribes we no longer recognise or pay attention to, it’s the end of the world as they know it.

  ~

  Kirsty and I have had a tough day, physically and emotionally. Coming off any addictive drug is hard, and technology is no different. It doesn’t happen very often, but we both wish we could just chill out in front of a film for the evening and get out of our heads. That’s not an option anymore.

  It’s dark. I light a couple of candles, and we lie in each other’s arms in front of the fire. We talk now and again, but are mostly silent. Sleep will come, and tomorrow will be a different day, when things will look and feel a lot different. I knew we would have moments like this. I also know that such moments will become rarer as time goes on and the temptations of technology weaken their hold on us.

  The fire burns orange and red, and soothes us to sleep.

  ~

  It’s morning, and the dense fog around Dunquin has lifted. Walking down the hill towards the Blasket Centre – a museum of the islands – I think to myself how minimal and unobtrusive the marketing of the centre, and the islands themselves, is around Dunquin. Understated on the outside, its insides are quietly impressive but, unlike the islands’ houses, which thus far I’ve only seen in old photographs, it is similar to all museums: oversized, spacious, grandiose.

  I wander around it for a couple of hours. I take notes on the tools they used. I examine the innards of a mock-up set of what their stone cottages would have been like, and read about academics like Robin Flower – whom they affectionately nicknamed ‘Blaithín’, meaning ‘little flower’ – and George Thomson, both of whom encouraged and helped the islands’ earliest writers to leave an account of the kind of lives which, in Ó Criomhthain’s prophetic words, ‘will never be again’.

  Their tools (the word ‘technology’ didn’t gain popularity until the mid-twentieth century) spoke of a way of life that my own generation – which has sent people into outer space to explore the potential for life on such a hostile, lifeless planet as Mars – now considers absolutely impossible. For lighting they immersed a peeled rush in a scallop shell of fish oil. They used a simple, wooden tool for twisting straw into rope; a long-bladed spade with a wing on the side, called a sleán, designed specifically for cutting turf; and a wooden rake to help gather seaweed. To carry both the turf and the seaweed they made creels – wicker baskets that act as panniers – for their donkeys’ backs.

  From the Blasket Centre we walk to the ferry through Dunquin. It’s a fine morning, but the only other people we encounter are inside cars, which are making their way to the bigger towns where bigger money is to be made. The school holidays haven’t started yet, so Kirsty and I are two of the only tourists. Descending the steep path to the pier – up which the Islanders would have driven sheep, carried the corpses of their friends and relations, or hauled lobsters and mackerel – I can’t help but absorb the sight before me: the Great Blasket Island, looking like a monstrous whale basking in the Atlantic Ocean, its hump touching a clear blue sky as it faces the warmth of a sun awakening over to the east. From this vantage point it looks dignified, arresting, defiant, self-assured, entirely alone. Whoever lived there over the millennia, they knew how to look after themselves.

  On the pier we board a small, lightweight ferry manned by two boatmen, who tell us they are fishermen on their days off. As we move across the Sound it rocks dramatically on relatively calm waters, and I can’t help but contemplate what being in a canvas-covered naomhóg, around midnight in the heart of a storm, must have felt like for a people who famously could not swim.

  ~

  The dawn sky is ablaze with all sorts of reds and oranges and pinks, so I pull on my boots and make off on a ramble while the weather is still fine. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning, and all that. As I walk I’m usually searching for something: berries, leaves, clarity, or lessons from the beings we are forgetting how to listen to.

  The ungodly hours are m
y most sacred time of the day. I sometimes wonder why most of humanity refuses these moments, and places like this, but part of me is thankful that they do. The other part of me wishes everyone could witness the earthly glory before me, marvel at its mystery and worship it and all it comprises. Each to their own.

  As I turn the bend by Packie’s old house, which was once the gatehouse for Sir Thomas Burke’s (and his predecessors’) estate, I notice a few lengths of silage wrap wrapped around giant spears of Japanese knotweed, an invasive species which was brought to Ireland as an exotic ornamental perennial in the mid-1800s. There’s more of the plastic on a hawthorn tree, where it clings to its own sense of meaning, while a loose ball of it is blocking up a ditch a little further up the road. In other parts of the country farmers have started using pink silage wrap in support of a cancer charity, but in these parts it is still just the black, run-of-the-mill, cancerous stuff.

  A farmer across the way calls me over. He quickly needs a hand moving a couple of bullocks, and though it’s only 1.5 kilometres up the road, he insists on giving me a lift. Ten years ago, when I was an environmentalist and animal rights activist, I couldn’t have imagined a future for myself where I would be chasing bullocks into a pen, ready to be tagged and numbered and tested for tuberculosis. Back then, my opinions were derived from documentaries and footage from factory farms. These days I have broken sleep for two or three nights as I listen, first-hand, to the cries of the mother for the newborn calf that was taken from her.

  When I lived in Bristol, activists – including me – would be forever falling out over theories of society, ecology, politics and culture. Out here we need each other too much to fall out over such things. The job takes longer than expected – the bullocks have their own ideas about the day ahead – and the farmer tells me a bit about his history, and that of the farm, as we go. It’s a tough, unenviable story, and the more I listen to it the more I admire him for getting up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other. It’s the first time we’ve properly spoken to each other, and he leaves saying he’ll pop over one evening for a drink in the sibín.